


Habits

by inkpink



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, F/F, Gen, Minor Body Horror, Past Character Death, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-28
Updated: 2017-09-25
Packaged: 2018-12-08 03:32:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11638056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkpink/pseuds/inkpink
Summary: Three times Rose Lalonde gets drunk and once the experience is sobering.





	1. Id

The first time Rose gets drunk, she is sitting in an empty room made of metal, careening through space. It strikes her as humorously akin to a cage. If not that, then an asylum of olde, walls scrawled with chalk instead of padded and stained. Her arms are wrapped tightly around her knees. The meteor is colder than every New England winter of her childhood compounded. A ball of silken white yarn sits at her side like an afterthought, the color of wizard beards and purity constructs. A failing effort to recall some element of the domestic: of frosty evenings beside a fire, tomes of H. P. Lovecraft, and her mother tiptoeing the grey area of borderline alcoholism. A side of the American dream Rockwell never deigned to immortalize. Her thorns sit in her lap, crackling with a fuliginous energy and humming faintly. She’s cracking her knuckles in a cacophonous chorus of bone and sinew to keep her hands busy, anything in an effort to keep from making another goddamn psychosis hat. She can’t. She can’t. She can’t knit any more. She’s already got a pile of the damn things crowding the corner of her room. Their colors range from Poor Coping Skills Cerulean to Maternal Issues Magenta. There’s even a few that she is apt to refer to as Jealousy Jade in the drafty, empty hallways of her mind. The habit is a relic of how she used to pass her time before strifes and scratches. It feels deeply wrong to do it here, forge a destiny for the balls of yarn while hers remains uncertain. All this alone time is making her frustratingly esoteric. 

Their journey is faintly reminiscent of a family car trip. Her monotonous days are fraught with differing variants of “Are we there yet?”, and their motley extraterrestrial coalition is united by a hiveminded desire for snacks. The only missing detail is that no one asks for bathroom breaks. There’s nothing so quaint as a futuristic family sedan, hurtling through the cosmos on a fated trip to Nowhere. Nowhere presumably being Their Destiny. Nowhere being the world they left, the one they’re journeying towards, and the colorless vacuum in which they currently reside. Nowhere, inhabited by divine Nobodies. She is reminded faintly of Odysseus. The thought does not make her smile. Her metaphoric ambiguity is starting to distress her. She is beginning to sound altogether too much like Dave. 

Dave, who is now seated at the other end of this execrable rock, playing make-believe and building castles out of cans. Karkat is holed up in what’s become their pseudo-living room in this sorry excuse for a family unit, probably paging through another torrid troll romance. Rose continues to feign an interest in the things as a grand private joke, but in all honesty, the prose is a bit simplistic for her to truly enjoy. 

Kanaya, she supposes, is hidden in her room, most likely sewing some magnificent creation she will no doubt emerge in a few hours from now. Christ, it is so difficult to talk to her. Their textual banter had come so easily, but now, faced with something so distinctly alien and so distinctly... _ desirable _ , Rose is, to put it lightly, fucked. She uncaptchalogues the magnetic wodka to stare at for the fourth time this week. It’s become the crystal ball of this new era. 

While her brother by virtue of ectobiology is prone to zipping through dreambubbles, Rose glimpses unsettling snatches of the future when she sleeps. Perhaps being out in the Furthest Ring has amplified the voices of her past patrons. Perhaps her loneliness has made her more susceptible. Regardless, she’s taken to avoiding closing her eyes for too long, lest old friends find it necessary to probe their tentacles through her mind. Wading through familiar waters never fails to make her feel distinctly Cimmerian.

Responsibility for her past follies is a familiar weight upon her shoulders. She and Dave have grown used to bearing responsibility for wrong turns. If the timeline knots up on itself, Dave retraces his steps. If Rose selects the incorrect path, she scrubs at her eyes and squints into the white-hot glow of possibility. John and Jade have paid their entry fee - the sacrifice of their loved ones and their blood spilt on a slab - but she and Dave pay each day. With one foot in the past and the other in the future, their price is eternal.

A single floodlight towers a story or two above her, casting a harsh, blue light across the lab. The atmosphere illuminates a day lost to memory. One saturated with freezing rain and outlined by an elaborate sepulchre. The memory pricks at her tear ducts. Jaspers’ funeral was a time that she long touted as the worst day of her life. Her mother’s harsh parody of all that Rose held dear, swathed in black and housed in elaborate marble, seemed a stunning example of the tragedy of her youth. In retrospect, her mother’s somber theatrics now seem like a warning. As if to give Rose her one chance to mourn a life stolen from her. An eerie demonstration, cloaked in connotations, that there would be no time to grieve for the bodies of friends claimed by incorrect choices. Only enough time to move on. To improve. To elucidate their second chance. It has become a familiar feeling, the loss of a lifelong friend. 

Rose leans her head back against the cool steel of the wall and uncaps the wodka. The subtext of her childhood is one of the few she’d rather never read. A Hemingway quote is floating through her mind, some trite bullshit about pleasure and pain and light and dark. Death had always been somewhat of a joke to her mother. It stirs in Rose a feeling like lead in her veins. It spreads like spilled merlot on a white tablecloth. Her eyes sting. 

She acutely remembers dying. The agonizing pain of a blade in her stomach. A burn like nothing she’d ever felt before, like a forest fire licking horribly at her synapses. The lightheaded balloon of bleeding out, grey leaching from her skin and blood turning the balcony’s dust to mud. The air impossibly still as John took a last shallow breath, less than an inch from her fingertips. Then cold. Cold forever. 

Rose recalls the singe of an ancient sun. The feeling of her skin melting and dripping like candle wax, exposing matchstick mortal bones that soon caught flame. In exchange for the swell of brilliance that birthed the very sun that killed her, the game fashioned a likewise paradox. The Seer of Light returned a phoenix, emerging from the explosion with sparks in her blood and flames burning steadily where her heart used to beat. Those embers that smolder in her soul now cloud her thoughts with fuliginous smoke. 

She has yet more distant memories of an unfinished pesterlog. A line of text abandoned. Dying alone in the dark. Death, she thinks, is a lot like falling asleep. One waits and waits for what seems like eons, and suddenly they’re out, as though something greater has flipped a switch. 

The quote comes back to mind.  _ I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure.  _ She’s always required a rather heuristic approach to learning, she decides, swirling the silvery liquid back and forth and watching it sway against the curves of the W-shaped flask. The floodlight above fizzles out. 

She misses her mother fiercely. The want burns in her core like stab wounds and suns. She grew up fairly lonely but never alone. Always did her mother lurk around every corner, down basement steps, just a room away. She sharply recalls sneaking down the creaking stairs at night, and finding her mother passed out on the white couch, a drained martini glass and an empty bottle of vodka watching from the coffee table. She washes the memory down with a swallow of something that tastes like ozone.

Rose glows faintly in the dark lab, a goddess nursing spirits. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Underage drinking is bad! Only Juice Hugs for we reasonable youth


	2. Ego

The second time Rose gets drunk goes relatively like the first, as with the second and third and fourth until her weeks become a blur of secretive swallows and blackout inebriation. She hosts three passive-aggressive self-interventions before the charm wears off and she acknowledges that alcoholism is a family trait better left unfettered. 

It starts off as something she does whenever Dave has his hands full of chalk or Kanaya’s otherwise indisposed. Not that being indisposed is any easy feat on this meteor. That’s why Rose begins to spend her spare time crouched in front of the alchemiter. It’s goddamn embarrassing to continue imbibing children of the original magnetic wodka as whenever she drinks the stuff, she finds herself miraculously trailed by a parade of empty Tab cans. She sets off on a new adventure attempting to alchemize moonshine out of pretty much anything she can find on the ship. She even tests a pale green derivative of lab slime, which smells unsettlingly like Jade. As a bonus, she gets to see Kanaya whenever she appears to alchemize more fabric. It makes her heart throw sparks up into her throat and fizzle out her words. 

Liquor quiets the bonfire in Rose’s rib cage and forces it down to a manageable sputter.  She doesn't feel quite so feverish with a flask in her hand, not so insistent. She is tired, cool, and blurry. Nothing hurts. The unforgiving burn translates to a warm glow deep in her stomach. She can’t put her finger on why swallowing sunshine reminds her so much of the forgiving, all-encompassing darkness she used to dabble in. Must be the parallels. That’s part of why she started drinking, after all. To unearth the deeper truth behind the connection between she and the woman who raised her. 

Lately though, said quest for truth has become a blinding need. When she’s not drinking, she paces corridors, chasing the answer to a question she can’t riddle out. She can’t sit still, as though if she lingers on one surface for too long it will burst into flames. She tests the bounds of how long she can stay awake in the body of a goddess but loses track of days and nights with ease.  It seems like forever, but appearances can be deceiving. Her natures are fused into one twisted waking nightmare. She finds it hard to sleep, mind racing so quickly as to burn her eyelids. It’s difficult for her to concentrate on any one thing for too long. She inevitably becomes distracted by that question ever-present in her mind, a door without lock or key, a box in which Schrodinger himself resides. Her aspect has never been an easy thing to manage. Balancing her desire for knowledge and the destructive fervor that haunts her every move is an act Rose has proved rather poor at. Her head is a hideous amalgamation of light and dark, a horrifying coupling that births monsters and wicked angels. The Seer of Light is built of blinding rays and twilight zones, a feat of smoke and mirrors.  

Kanaya,  _ of course _ , is a graceful mistress of her aspect. There is no war inside her. Rose can see that in her careful stitches, the fluid way her hands shape invisible figures when she talks. Her meticulous sentences seem catered to creation. Every word gives rise to a world.  She coexists with her aspect in a beautiful relationship that paints love along the lengthy, dark halls of the meteor. She harbors no fear of the untold cosmos spread before her. Of course she doesn’t. Kanaya is the mother of the universe, and its overwhelming affection for her seems to ooze from the walls.

Liquor passes delicate fingers over Rose’s lashes and allows her to walk through life with all three eyes closed. Liquor steals the violent energy from her limbs before she can ruin the first thing she gets her hands on. Liquor pulls her from the spotlight and makes her brave. 

She plucks up the courage to speak to Kanaya on one of those occasions when the warmth of her incandescent heart doesn’t scorch her throat so fiercely. One of those occasions in which she’s torn a page from her mother’s book and downed a magic elixir. With botched moonshine as her aegis, she stumbles down shadowy paths, clutching the hand of a relationship finally made simple. The freezing halls are so warm now. Her sentences flow easily. She’s losing eloquence, but at least she can choose the right words, not tie her own tongue into knots as she struggles to regurgitate a dictionary at random. Rose feels distant enough from herself to know she is right where she should be. 

Liquor helps her pass from the hands of reality to fantasy in a soothingly lonely cycle of abandonment and adoption.

She reads a lot. She writes more. Writing drunk is an unusual experience, and she takes a distinct of pleasure in how terrible her syntax becomes as it grows deeper steeped in ethanol.  Shots are the periods at the ends of her sentences. As long as she keeps taking them, the questions that plague her will eventually stop. It is out of necessity that she reaches for the bottle. If she doesn’t drink, the ink will never dry. 

Liquor holds a gentle finger against her lips and shushes the words right out of her. It steals her crackling fear and douses the fire.

“You smell like Lindsay Lohan fresh out of rehab,” Dave remarks on the night she receives her first kiss.

“That is a very large hickey on your neck,” she says observantly. He flushes and leaves her alone.

Liquor grants her dreamless sleep, and if that isn’t love, Rose has never known it at all. 


	3. Superego

“Where’s your guard dog?”

“What?”

“Cat. Guard cat. Trained panther on a leash. Where’s Karkat?” Rose clarifies after Dave continues to not get the joke.

“Fucking around somewhere, dunno. Where’s Kanaya?”

His form is washed out into sepia by the semi-darkness of the hallway. He’s blurry too, swimming before her eyes. Not swimming. Expectant. Treading water.

“Am I my Kan’s keeper?” she snarks back. Her tongue gets tangled up on the syllables. A single blonde eyebrow creeps up from beneath Dave’s shades.

“I didn't know you read the Bible.”

“Cain and Abel, Dave. Oldest set of poorly-equipped siblings in the book. Besides, unanticipated apotheosis causes one to become distinctly...searching.”

He shuffles, jams his hands deep into his pockets.

“Is that what you're doing back here?” Dave asks. His shoulders go up and down like buoys at sea. “Letting Jesus take the wheel? Having a little one on one with the big guy upstairs? Because I've warned you about the stairs, Rose. I’ve-”

“Maybe. I'm fucking around a little somewhere, _dunno,”_ she cuts him off before he can finish his bit. Tonight is no night for stale memes.

“Rose,” Dave hazards, “Are you okay?”

He’s steadying her with one hand before she realizes she’s swaying.

“What?” she asks despite hearing him. His words are muted. They brush her face and slink past her ears so she can only make out the garbled ripples of them. If she wasn’t so foggy, she could read the slimy trails they leave in the air. “Oh. Yes. I'm fine, Dave, please just let me-”

Her bag of knitting tumbles from her arms. She watches the needles fall, but she cannot hear them hit the floor. Sunk a little deeper than usual tonight. There must have been a reason. Some reason she’s thankful she can’t recall right now.

“Fuck,” she says eloquently. “Shit.”

Dave plucks the mess of yarn from the frigid floors. It’s deep, dark jade. Her stomach knots.

“This hat’s taking a really long time,” he observes.

“It’s cabling,” she retorts.

“I thought that was easy,” he says like a smartass, tracing the loose strings of the yarn with his index. It’s a shitty hat. Not even much of a point in working on it anymore. It looks like a bastardized yarmulke. Perhaps Jesus hasn’t taken the wheel, but Moses has surely taken the needles.

“Nothing’s very easy anymore, Strider,” she hears float up out of a deep well in her ribcage.

“Rose,” her brother says again, and there’s an edge of insistence in his voice this time. She knows exactly what he’s trying to do. She is so, so tired. Almost too tired to circumlocute her way out of this. Tired enough to crave nothing but the sensation of drowning.

“Dave,” she parrots. She takes advantage of the hand he’s left on her, beginning to do a horrible shimmying adaptation of the tango. Shadows are eating at the edge of her vision. Her brother’s face is creased with pillow marks. They wash in and out of sight beneath the wavering light overhead. Guard cat must be asleep then. All protectors disappear as soon as the lights go dim.

“You're not okay,” Dave decides.

“It’s late. Let me go.”

“No.”

God, they are petulant children. She wants another shot.

“Dave, you are being outrageously difficult right now. Unhand me and…” The words trickle off into a blurry mess. It’s not a slur. Only fuzzy.

He guides her down the empty hall. It’s as silent as things get with Dave. They don't make conversation, but he’s whistling a tune suspiciously similar to the Champs’ _Tequila_ , hands drumming a beat against the red fabric of his thighs. She wants to tell him it’s in poor taste, but it’s too effortlessly ironic to risk ruining. It must be two or three or four AM, some time early enough for the trolls to be in bed but late enough for she and Dave to have their own respective business with the gloom in the corners of the lab.

“Not Kanaya’s room,” she interrupts as they draw close to the line of doors that marks the area they've designated as habitable. He doesn't argue. Bless him and this loop of self-destructive secrecy they’ve riddled out. The two abet the other, but she imagines she’d somehow be worse off without Dave’s terse nods and tight lips in the face of hardship.

Her own room is horrifically messy, illustrated in the trademark grayscale of the meteor. Dave guides her through piles of handmade clothes, trips on a knitted Cthulhu plush, and skids across a handful of ballpoints scattered haphazardly in the corner. Her lilac sheets are stale but unslept in. Admittedly she does not spend many nights here.

Dave sets the confiscated silver flask on her makeshift nightstand, fashioned from stacks of outdated Psychology books. Rose doesn’t recall surrendering it to him in the first place. She sinks into her comforter as he struggles to light one of the many black taper candles balanced precariously atop it. She jabs the wick of the closest with her index, on which a sputtering flame has begun to gasp.

Dave watches curiously. He’s perched on the edge of the bed, knees pulled up to his chest. When the candle is lit, he gingerly reaches for her hand and blows out the glowing finger.

It startles her how real her hand looks in Dave’s. There's weight and flesh and structure, an exact juxtaposition to the shadow she feels like. She shuts her eyes against the blistering truth.

“Do you ever not feel real?”

Dave’s shrug shakes the bed. It feels like an ocean.

“Only when I'm alone.”

“Is that why you stay with him?” she asks.

Rose can make out the sounds of him considering the merit of boarding up and inventing some bullshit excuse. She can hear him him toy with a loose string on her blanket as he deduces that it’s not worth it, so she’s expecting the appearance of the words that follow. She’s not expecting the honest weight they carry.

“A little, I guess. I feel safer.” He pauses. The silence is comfortable, warm with Dave’s aura. She can’t hear the pace of his thoughts. They must not be racing so terribly. “I also kinda love him,” he confides. “I mean, I think.”

“That must be nice.”

Dave turns to fix his gaze on her. His shades wink and gleam in the candlelight like the eyes of his favorite birds. His hair is flat on one side from being pressed against a shoulder, curls loose from being finger-combed through. His limbs sprawl comfortably, like a hipster Raggedy Andy. He bears every appearance of having spent the better part of the night in the arms of someone dear to him, save the dark circles he's inherited from the boy in question. There’s no use denying the signs of sweet, easy affection he’s wearing.

“Haven't you had the eldritch vampire girlfriend of your dreams since day one on this godawful rock?”

The candle trembles, giving shape and form to the silhouettes lurking just outside the safe isle of her bed. They dance wickedly at the edges of her sight. Rose wishes she possessed the fervor that animates them. She was not created to be kept within the safe circle of a lantern.

“It’s not the same. I get lonely in rooms full of people. I get lonely by myself. I get lonely sleeping next to the girl of my dreams. It doesn't matter. Sometimes the closer I am to people, the further away I feel. I’m beginning to believe it’s a part of me.”

What she really wants to say is that _sometimes people lose their mystery,_ once she figures out the grand riddle of what makes them tick _it is no fun anymore._ She’s pieced together the puzzle of the world and remedial lessons in apathy are her reward. The candle gutters out.

The flutter of Dave’s cape serves as white noise in the sucking black hole of her bedroom as he pulls her into his arms. It is a strange feeling, but not directly bad. It’s a tentative hug, as though he’s bridging a learning curve. She reciprocates to the best of her ability. It is only marginally less shitty than the yarmulke.

“It’s gonna be okay.”

“You’re no oracle. You don't know,” she grumbles bitterly into his shoulder.

“Yeah, because you've always put so much stock in fate. That’s the Rose Lalonde I know: completely content to do whatever anyone else tells her will happen. Definitely not the type to consort with dark gods or throw herself into solar bodies on her own whim. Fuck no. Who’s that? She sounds edgy. Maybe you should get to know that chick. Ask her out for AJ or something.”

“That girl died in a blaze of green electricity.”

Dave stretches out next to her on ~~Kanaya’s pillow~~ an empty pillow.

“Maybe the one who came out can learn from that,” he offers.

“I’m sick of learning from my mistakes.”

They sigh in unison, Dave’s a whistle between his teeth and Rose’s a wave lapping at the shore.

“It’s fun for a while. To do all this stupid, obligatory teen stuff. But eventually it’s like, what's the point? Why fall in love when all it does is make you question every fucking thing you do, and keep you awake when you already can’t goddamn sleep? Why enjoy cool god powers when it just makes you think of the things you had to lose to get them in the fucking first place?” He’s picking up speed on a merry-go-round.

“Why drink if you can’t stop?” she adds.

“It all sucks major ass,” Dave concedes. “So maybe what I mean by making mistakes isn’t all that horseshit. What I mean is, make the mistakes your past self would have hated you for.”

She blinks at him.

“Fall in love. Trust people. Genuinely enjoy the things you like without overthinking or worrying about or overcomplicating shit. I know I mentioned falling in love for both of those things but like...love isn't this crazy, nebulous concept we always used to think it was, y’know? Not just this unreachable ideal. It doesn't have to hurt all the time. It can feel really safe. Like friendship.”

“Like home.”

Together, they mumble, “Same thing.” Dave snorts. He pulls himself from his sprawl into a sitting position.

“About that girl who died,” Rose ventures.

“Yeah?”

“I heard a rumor her deluded brother went with her.”

“Yeah, sounds like him. Man, that guy. What a shithead. Probably likes vaporwave. Bet he’s afraid of puppets or something dorky like that.”

Dave ducks without warning, disappearing beneath the bed. Her heart hammers dully in her chest as she imagines him colliding with the motley crew of bottles stashed there. The sound never comes. Instead, the room is bathed with ruby light.

Dave has plugged what appears to be a nightlight into the outlet closest to her bedside. It’s shaped haphazardly into a face that is all too familiar to her. She’d be lying if she claimed the scruffy mug of Sweet Bro wasn’t a welcome sight.

“What is Sweet Bro doing in my...motherfucking chambers?” Rose finds it imperative to ask.

“The real question is, what was Sweet Bro _not_ doing in your motherfucking chambers? He’s a regular Oedipus over here,” Dave quips. “You don't have to do it all yourself anymore. Someone’s gotta take a turn while you rest your eyes.”

“You've always been partial to self-sacrifice.”

In the half-light of his heinous creation, she thinks she sees him flash her a wry smile.

“Learned from the best.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally this story had a concrete happy ending but that shit’s boring! Crying is good for you


End file.
